By Ezekiel Buchheit
Arizona Daily Wildcat
November 13, 1997

A Brainless Dunk Pt II: Satan's Hangtime

Arizona Daily Wildcat Ezekiel Buchheit

Shortly after sports were invented by the Vikings they gained their biggest fan. That's right, Satan.

Satan loves sports, and he quickly saw it as the best way to physically manifest his evil. Hence the existence of organized sports (organized sports, organized religion, organized crime - connection? I think so).

Let me stress right now that it is "organized" sports that exist as an extension of Satan's power, not sports in general. If a group of people go out in a friendly manner to throw a ball around a few times, I'm sure they'll be safe. Of course Satan will be watching just to check out and see who is ready for the big leagues.

And that is where the real problem lies in sports. Sports were supposed to be an activity to pass the free time. A game to get the children out of the house for the summer and keep them occupied. It wasn't some awesome spectator activity. Nobody cared if little Bobby could throw a ball harder than Steve, because people in those times had things to do that were more important. Like real jobs.

But somehow this children's game spread like some disease to the point that people regularly spend hundreds of dollars to watch - not participate - but watch somebody that they have no personal relationship of their own with, play one of these children's games.

Nobody fills up arenas to watch somebody build with tinker-toys. There is no Michael Jordan, the world´s greatest Lego builder. That all seems ridiculous doesn't it.

Someday I would love to be a sports commentator, just for the chance to reduce sports down to what they really are. Not glorifying them.

"And some tall man has the ball in his hands. He is running down the court while simultaneously bouncing the ball a lot. He's stopped. Oh wow, he has hurled the ball into the air in THE EXACT SAME DIRECTION AS THE LITTLE CIRCLE ATTACHED TO THE BOARD! OH MY GOSH, THE BALL WENT THROUGH THE LITTLE CIRCLE! The crowd has gone mad! It's a complete riot. And the team manager rushes on to the court to give the tall man lots of money."

Have you ever been so irate because you lost some type of game that you were willing to fight over it? Have you ever yelled at a friend because his or her ability to kick a ball lacked in comparison to your mighty efforts and "caused" the team to "lose?" Do you purchase shirts that have brand logos all over them, in turn transforming you into some kind of walking advertisement, and feel more confident in yourself while doing it? Were you ever willing to just beat the hell out of some other spectator in the stands because he was rooting for the other team?

Chances are that at some point in time you've seen people do something like this, or you were the guilty party yourself. These are all great sins of sports, and are the specific reasons I have such problems with them. Well, not all the reasons. I also hate sports because the people make far too much money. There is a person out there right now, two steps away from finding some type of preventative cure for cancer, and they are struggling to meet ends meet and keep a grant going to fund their project. Meanwhile some overgrown kid who somehow passed college (majoring in Twine Looping with a minor in Asian and Middle Eastern Food Baskets), takes his private Leer Jet from New York to California because he over heard somewhere that California has beautiful sunsets.

But despite all my complaints, I do find some entertainment value in sports. But not so much in the games themselves. I find it entertaining to humor the idea that this whole thing is some type of legitimate business. People grow up with aspirations of being a sports star, or a talent agent, or a coach or a manager. Adults get together and manage their little teams, tell their little players what to do, travel around, have adventures.

Sports are like some giant collective middle age crisis, and it's in this form that I find entertainment. Remove sports from the picture, pretend they never existed, then we would be some kind of huge erector set industry complete with large arenas wherein the unskilled erector set builders, or the "weekend erector set warriors" as they are called, get together to watch as the top talents come together to build awesome structures like "The Crane" and "The Bridge." So in that sense I suppose sports does act as a positive social structure by pacifying the old and the old at heart.

They just make so much money doing so little.

And I want it.

Ezekiel Buchheit is a freshman majoring in English.